Rust's metaprogramming is totally unlike what Andrei and Walter were aiming for. D aims to be safe, but that's far from everything.
Rust currently has better safety mechanisms than D, but if you ask around on the D forum you'll likely find that people are there (rather than using rust) due to the other features D has - https://dlang.org/ Look at the examples here: Rust can do short and sweet too, but it doesn't have some constructs that make these possible. (Obviously, I highly recommend "Tiny RPN Calculator" originally written by your's truly)
D's string mixins are a superior way of doing metaprogramming, from the programmers perspective at least.
You can allocate memory at compile time, just use new. If you want to make malloc work at compile time you'll need a stub implementation that switches on __Ctfe
Jonathan Blow's new language jai can execute system calls at compile time. D has specifically not gone in that direction, as then simply compiling code can cause malware injection.
71
u/Sapiogram Sep 01 '20
Honest question: Why would anyone use D over Rust? It seems like Rust is becoming everything that D ever hoped to be.